Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life

by Whitley Strieber

  “No, no, I’ll go up.” There was no other choice. In a family this close to exploding into blood and death, he had to do everything he could to keep things going.

  “Well, good,” she said. “That’s good. Come on.”

  He followed her up the stairs, trying not to think about gallows. He was an adult. He could handle this.

  Ian was in the kitchen, his blond hair glowing in a shaft of morning light. As a little boy he had been so beautiful that he unsettled people. Men and women alike found themselves wanting to hold him and touch him, to the point that it frightened some of them, made them uneasy. But that was Ian’s nature, to draw, from deep within all whom he encountered, things that they did not even know were there.

  “Hey, Ian.”

  “Hey, Dad.”

  The boy’s knife slithered in his breakfast steak, his fork worked the eggs with busy clinks. The sound that came when he guzzled his milk revolted Paul beyond words. Then he glanced up, and his eyes were the blue of morning. “Sorry about the music.”

  His heart said, All is forgiven, O my son! His voice said, “No big deal.”

  “You’d think they would’ve made thicker walls back in the old days.”

  Translation: I heard you fucking Mom and it embarrassed me so bad I’m still congealed inside. Paul’s heart opened to his boy. “Yeah,” he said. “But look at it this way, Ian. Your olds are tight. Better than a lot of kids, where the olds hate each other. You want the olds to be tight.”

  “For sure, Dad. Melissa Smith’s parents go final today. We’re celebrating.”

  “Oh? And why is that?”

  “Why?” He swept the air with a closed fist, innocently showing off his smooth, gracefully muscled arm. “No more bruises for Missy.”

  “Her dad hit her?”

  “Slapped, mostly.”

  He tried to call up a picture of Dick Smith, but could recall only a pallid executive with beat-up old glasses. “That Mr. Peepers guy?”

  “Get him drunk and he’s deadly. Especially to girls. He left Dickie pretty much alone, except when he tried to get him off Missy. Then he’d come after him with a belt.”

  What was it he was hearing in Ian’s voice? Was it curiosity or compassion? Ian had never been hit. In fact, he lived in a home where a raised voice was a rarity, and punishments consisted of expressions of disappointment.

  For Becky and Paul, ultra-violence was work. Their private lives had to be as peaceful as a Trappist oratory.

  “So,” Ian said, “you no like Leo?”

  “No like Leo.”

  “She’s redefining the feminine, Dad. She’s politically, like, important. She’s going beyond feminism into grrl power. I mean, she’s this incredibly sweet, vulnerable girl who’s totally tough at the same time. Athene, goddess of wisdom and war, Lilith, mother of demons. Leo’s reempowering the myth of the feminine. Good-bye, Tinkerbelle.”

  “It’s just that…it was kinda loud.”

  “My loudness is mine, not hers. Let it sink into your soul, man, let it—” He laughed, suddenly, a brief, embarrassed chuckle. Ian was remembering why he’d turned it up so loud. He shut his mouth so hard his teeth clicked, as if he’d felt pain in the laugh and was trying to bite it off.

  “I’m sorry we disturbed you,” Paul murmured.

  Ian smiled a little. What son cannot see past the masks of his father? It struck Paul unexpectedly this time, the depth and power of his love for his boy. He’d been astonished to hear a baby crying, in the moments after the battle with Miri. Then he’d found the crib behind a curtain in the bedroom of the lavish San Francisco apartment they’d tracked her to. Paul had known instantly that this was his son, and why Miri had seduced him: to get this child.

  Paul had lifted the wriggling life from its bed and had instantly and completely loved the baby he knew he should kill. He had tightened his hands around the tiny chest until the kid squirmed, until he could feel the heart fluttering like a captured moth. He had remained like that, his own sweat dripping down onto the squalling thing, his fingers trembling, his jaw clenching.

  The baby had seemed so vulnerable, so tiny, at once more deeply a part of Paul Ward than anyone else could ever be—and more alien and more dangerous.

  “I’ll take him,” Becky had said, and swept him up in her arms. Paul had raised his head and seen in his sweating, tough fighting companion something so deeply true, and so unexpectedly soft and just very damn appealing, that it had made him cover his weapon with the blood-spattered edge of his jacket and say, “Marry me.” To which she had replied, “Yeah, right.”

  Thus are born romances, and father and motherhoods, and the journeys of children. Tentatively, he reached across to Ian, who did not react. He immediately withdrew. “Look,” he said, “I’m gonna drive down to the city. You want I should drop you at school?”

  “I drive?” Ian asked.

  “Go for it.”

  They headed out. “Seriously,” Ian said, “she’s making a statement. That’s why kids like her. This is the postfeminist era. You and Mom—you don’t see that. It’s not enough for women to get the boardroom. There’s a level of psychological and cultural empowerment that they have not yet captured. Leo is about a whole new way of looking at what women are.”

  Given what he knew about Leo, it was all Paul could do not to spit his contempt. Women were soft and good, not dangerous.

  But Becky—his sweet, soft Becky—was one of the most dangerous human beings he’d ever known, dammit!

  When Paul said nothing, Ian spoke again: “Women will never become all they can be until we respect their danger. I love Momma, but sweet is not what women need to be right now.”

  Paul smiled to himself. What would you think, little boy, if you’d seen your mommy as I have seen her, filthy in a black cave, face to face with a monster that can throw a goddamn knife faster than a bullet, pounding away with a pistol as big as your head?

  But he said—could say—not one damn word. The dark power of women has a good side and a bad side, though, and this innocent boy was being attracted to the bad side.

  When they arrived at the school, Paul contented himself with a pat on the shoulder for his son.

  “Bye, guy,” he said, “love you.” And, God, he felt that. He felt that so deep, and it hurt so much.

  “Love you, Dad.”

  Then he was gone, disappearing into the morass of losers that populated his high school. Paul knew that they should have sent him to prep school. But the idea of letting him go out in the world on his own like that—it was just impossible. When Ian was so much as late coming home from a dance, Paul paced, worrying that he was out there in the hills somewhere, sniffing around some lonely cabin.

  Paul headed for the parkway, powering the vehicle expertly through the hairpins of East Mill Road. On the trip down to the city, he listened blankly to the late repeat of Morning Edition and remembered not a word.

  He pulled into One Police Plaza at exactly four minutes to ten and took the elevator up to the fifth floor. The duty officer was so beautiful that Paul practically had to glue the image of Becky onto his brain to avoid becoming terminally distracted. She had big green eyes and, beneath her starch-scented uniform blouse, two very shapely reasons that a blouse was different from a shirt.

  Would Leo the grrrl approve of the way I think? he wondered.

  “Mr. Ward, please come in. Coffee?”

  “Yeah, black and mean as you can make it.”

  She went out, and Binion said, “You’re gonna have to cut it before you can eat it. She doesn’t like suits, and you gave her license.” He gestured toward a chair, then dropped into his own. “You said fifteen minutes, no more.”

  “I’m looking at a possible murder.”

  “All right. That’s my kind of business.”

  He wanted to add, Committed by a vampire, but that was, of course, impossible. Then he wanted to say, Committed by Leo Patterson. But that was, if anything, even more impossible.

  “I
want to see all the raw MP sheets for yesterday.”

  The eyebrows flickered. The coffee came. The chief busied himself with his mug. “I’m trying to figure out which parts of the ethics code I wouldn’t be violating, and I can’t seem to find any. Except the prohibition against killing rats on Sunday. We’re okay there.”

  “Then just for Midtown North. Stuff that might not be in the computer.”

  “That you know isn’t in the computer, because you already looked. Stuff the detectives didn’t bother to post. The bullshit calls from drunks and paranoids, that kind of shit—am I right?”

  “Exactly right.”

  “Leave no tone unsturned, right, CIA? Thing is, if you guys are so careful, then why do we always lose?”

  “We don’t lose. We never lose.”

  “Oh, yeah, I musta got my doublethink backward.” He pushed a button. His orderly reappeared. “Sergeant, could you get MN to fax over all the shit outa the detectives’ trash cans. Gum wrappers, everything. Gum.”

  She withdrew.

  “You know, Paul, if I had some inkling of what you were doing, I could help you more. Offer insight. Resources.”

  “Need to know, I’m sorry.”

  “Look, let me put this another way. If you’re going to get any more help from this department, I’m going to need some kind of supporting authorization. I don’t mean to be a bureaucrat—”

  “You are a bureaucrat. Covering your ass.”

  “Covering my ass.”

  The sergeant brought in a couple of faxed sheets. “Quiet night,” Binion said, reading them. He handed them to Paul. The first was a list made by somebody taking phone calls. It was cryptic, but he could guess what things like “Drnk asshl” meant.

  He stuffed the fax in his pocket. Maybe the trip had been a bust. And yet, the man that Leo had murdered last night had been real. He had been alive, and now he wasn’t. Unless…could she have been meeting another creature like herself? God forbid. His firm belief was that she was the only one. He and his team and the others around the world were good. They were damn good. She was the only one.

  So this Mr. Whoever had not been missed—at least, not yet. Maybe somebody would report him in a few days, but Paul did not have a few days. If there was any evidence of this man’s death left in Leo Patterson’s house, it would soon be gone.

  “I think I’m running out my time,” Paul said.

  Something approaching a smile of relief flickered in Binion’s face. Paul decided that he probably couldn’t even imagine how much this man wanted him out of his office.

  He took off, thinking that he would have to proceed with his investigation on the ground, in the time-honored way of the policeman. There was a reason they used to be called flatfoots.

  Paul thought he might approach the house. As soon as she’d started getting rich, Leo had bought it from the trust that Miri had set up to hold her property. Miri had needed to be able to disappear for a century or so, and return to find that her taxes had continued to be paid. She had created a trust in Liechtenstein that did all the bookkeeping and made sure everything was running properly.

  Leo had known about the trust, and had somehow gotten it to sell her the property. How had she ever convinced them that they had the right to do this? No matter, it was now owned by Leo Patterson, big as life, the deed properly filed downtown.

  Paul had not entered the house since the debacle he had experienced there, those dizzying, maddening days of love, after Miri had seduced him. She’d known the secret of his blood before he knew she was a vampire. Realizing that her fellow Keepers, as they called themselves, were being decimated, she’d used him to make her pregnant. He had just enough vampire blood to do it, something he’d found out too late.

  In the end, after she was sure she was pregnant, she’d turned on him. He’d been completely blindsided. They’d had him trussed up in the damn basement, with the furnace door open, for God’s sake. Whereupon Becky had dropped down through a skylight, an angel from on high. Good woman power had saved him from bad woman power, the angel with the gun besting the angel with the hungry, sucking jaws.

  Even though it was forested with alarms and various electronic tripwires, there was a way into that house. He had known about it for years, but never used it before. No, he’d stayed away, far away. Only a fool would expose himself to a place that had been owned by a creature as hard to kill, and as intelligent, as a vampire.

  Paul wanted to believe that they were all gone. Wanted to. But if he really did believe that, then why hadn’t he taken the early retirement CIA had offered him six years ago?

  Because he believed nothing.

  He left One Police Plaza and got in his car. The morning sun shafted down through cathedrals of golden cloud; Manhattan sparked and roared. He negotiated Park Row to the Bowery, using his quick little Saab to outmaneuver trucks and cabs, whose drivers raged at him as he cut them off.

  Passing University Hospital, he thought of Dr. Sarah Roberts, that lost soul, and her twenty-year struggle to make sense of Miriam Blaylock’s blood. She’d been seduced, in the end, blooded before Leo was blooded. She lay now in some coffin somewhere, trapped in the strange, half-conscious nightmare of a creature that cannot die. He couldn’t despise her, she had been an excellent scientist. Really, she had discovered Blaylock. In a sense, she had discovered vampires. Too bad Miriam had found the soft, lonely place in her soul, and gone there, and exploited her weakness to make her a slave.

  By the time he flashed past Fiftieth Street, he realized that he was going seventy, whipping in and out of traffic so fast that people could only stand and stare. He hit the brakes. His reflexes made such maneuvers easy for him. He could have done the same thing at a hundred, just as efficiently. But you didn’t do high-speed driving in Manhattan, not if you didn’t want to attract some pretty upset traffic cops. He dropped back to forty and let the car slide into a right onto Fifty-sixth Street.

  He pulled into a garage on First Avenue. Up here, the brownies might or might not understand that his plate number said he was a federal officer. He got out of the car, gave the attendant his keys, and crossed the avenue. He passed then into the magical world of Sutton Place, which had once been a fabulous enclave of homes with gardens stretching down to what was then called the North River. The gardens were still there, but they had been rendered into walled stumps of their former grandeur when the East Side Highway was built.

  Among the fables of Manhattan is that of the tunnels. The abandoned Second Avenue Subway and other, more ancient tunnels—the first New York Central tunnel, the Crosstown Walkway, among others—snake beneath the streets. There are deeper, more hidden passages, too, the access tunnels for Con Ed’s steam lines, the sewers, and the access tunnels to the great water lines that shoot down from the upstate reservoirs at a depth of two hundred feet.

  There are also other tunnels down there, tunnels that have not been mapped on any map, and in those tunnels lay the undead vampires of New York. It had been a methodical carnage. It had also reduced the annual missing persons count by five thousand. That’s how many lives had been saved in this one city alone, five thousand a year.

  His team hadn’t even known of these tunnels. They’d thought that New York had few vampires. But Miriam Blaylock had escaped from her house into a tunnel, and that had led them to the rest of the infestation.

  He and Becky had not dared to follow her, not into that dark unknown. Later, though, the team had conquered it completely.

  It was a branch of Miriam’s escape tunnel that Paul would now use to enter her house. It would be tricky, though. His eyes were sharp enough to notice the twists and turns, but not as sharp as a vampire’s. Even though he was going only a couple hundred feet, getting lost was a distinct possibility. If that happened, he’d probably end up starving to death before he found his way out.

  He walked down Fifty-sixth Street to its end, then vaulted the wall that concealed Miriam’s garden from the world. He dropped down into it, look
ed immediately up toward the leaded glass windows of the music room. This was taking a mad chance, he knew that. But he also knew that no progress would be made without such chances.

  He took five quick steps to the back of the garden, then touched the pavement around a birdbath. Doing it just right caused a crack to open in the green of the lawn. There were a few hewn steps, and the rattle of busy water. It was low tide, so a faint glow could be seen from below where the tunnel opened onto the East River. For a few hours each day, the mouth was above water. He’d seen it from a boat. It was identical to the other drains beneath the esplanade that supported FDR Drive. There would be no reason whatever to suspect that it led to the hidden warrens of a vicious species of predator.

  He descended to a small landing at the bottom of ten steps, then pulled a lever which closed the entrance above him. Like everything made by them, age and long disuse had not reduced its efficiency. The trap above closed without a murmur or a creak.

  All he had was a penlight. But he had expected to get some information from the police. He had not expected that this situation would arise. For that reason, also, he was not armed. He stepped carefully, his head down, one hand guarding his forehead. Paul was easily as big as the striding horrors who had once used this tunnel.

  The long downslope led to the water, the upslope to the house. Paul went to the stone steps that rose into the cellar, climbed them, and confronted an ancient door with a cunning lock. He knew the secrets of these locks, with their gravity-driven systems that would defeat any normal means of opening them.

  He leaned against the door. His eyes closed, his jaw hanging with his concentration, he made a series of movements, alternately pressing the door and then releasing it. As he did so, he could hear the tumblers clicking. He’d learned this technique from his French colleague and dear friend, Colonel Jean Bocage. Bocage had learned it from the vampires. They did not travel with keys; knowledge of the locks and the tunnels meant that their whole secret world was always open to them.

  The door swung softly back, and the cool air of the house surrounded him. There was a scent, very subtle, not pleasant. What was it? He inhaled again, realized that he was smelling age—old cloth, old furniture, things so ancient that they were part of a kind of twilight. It was the scent of memory, this sweet, sad odor, and it filled the house.